Grifters (1990)

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A dark-hearted neonoir comes to a boil under the bright Los Angeles sun, in British director Stephen Frears’s rousing adaptation of the novel by dime-store bard Jim Thompson, a film that raises pulp to the realm of existential tragedy. A possessive mother (Anjelica Huston), her cynical son (John Cusack), and his scheming, seductive girlfriend (Annette Bening) are career swindlers circling one another in an elaborate emotional confidence game that grows increasingly perverse as love and trust turn to betrayal and Oedipal undercurrents rise to the surface. In Frears’s first Hollywood film, the ever-assured director and his trifecta of magnetic actors conjure a moody, unstuck-in-time vision of toxic Americana.